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OK, how can we address this issue?
Some people don’t understand the need.
I didn’t even pick up on the logic for a long time,
and I consider myself an expert on constitutional and business law.
There are three types of reparations that we will cover here,
Starting small:
Plaza reparations for the illegal streetcar destruction by the auto industry
(this would apply to many, if not most neighborhoods nationwide, but Adeline Plaza is cut and dry.
The nation also has to address freeway reparations,
for the planning and building of terribly harmful freeways
through virtually every inner-city African American neighborhood in the country.
Last but not least, of course, is the issue of reparations
for the most serious crime, victimizing the most people,
of any illegal act in the history of the U.S.
This issue has been swept under the carpets of rich people,
but our nation is still suffering the consequences,
and it must be addressed, the sooner the better.
(These are victims of false imprisonment and forced labor prior to the emancipation proclaimation and collapse of the criminal “confederacy of states”
What are reparations?
This part might be easy if I had a dictionary,
but C’est La Vie, so I’ll give it a shot:
In this context, “Reparations” are
compensation to victims of past crime.
Normally, if someone suffers from an illegal act,
the criminal is legally obligated to compensate the victim(s).
This is common law, and goes back at least to Roman times.
The purpose is to discourage crime.
If someone with money or property illegally hurts you,
causes pain or costs you money or time,
the lawbreaker is legally obligated to compensate you.,
As a last resort, the state/court/legal system may
seize the criminal’s property and sell it
in order to compensate or partially compensate the victim.
Criminals are not allowed to victimize innocent people and
leave them suffering while the criminal retreats to their luxury home.
Even the federal government itself is not allowed
to illegally victimize people and shrug it off.
So what if the crime was so great that the criminal
could not be brought to justice, because of political connections
or because the government itself committed the crime?
And if a broad class of victims was never compensated?
And if the criminal was so wealthy that even years later
they could still afford to compensate the victims?
These are the reparations we are referring to.
The crimes were so great,
and affected such a broad class of people,
That the continued lack of compensation is
Still causing serious problems for broad segments
of our nation, which might otherwise rank as one
the most advanced societies in human history.
However, there are still these lingering problems.
I used to imagine/fantasize that what happened a long time ago,
before I was born, was ancient history,
and just didn’t matter anymore.
. . .. . . But I was wrong. It does matter,
and anyone who doesn’t see a problem that must be solved is blind,
and we must make them see the truth before we can solve the problem.
Streetcar compensation:
My experience: I first experienced the steetcar reparations dilemma when I moved to Oakland in 1989. I had been a working class country boy, but the combined costs and responsibilities of college and having a car were too much, so I moved to the city so that I might not need a car anymore.
Living on Clairemont and Telegraph, and then on Adeline and MacArthur, the issue was clear. These were very dense neighborhoods, with lots of people needing to get around, but we still needed cars! It was almost unbelievable that here, in the heart of the city, there was no good transit. Then I learned that the neighborhoods were originally developed with quick electric streetcars everywhere, and 50 years ago they didn’t need cars, or wide streets, or parking garages, or even ambulances for the victims of cars.
And I learned that none other than General Motors itself had actually financed the destruction of these urban railways. Not enough people would buy cars when they could still ride electric streetcars.
Problem: Even today, these neighborhoods are devastated. You can’t get to work without a car, and if you are going to pay the cost of a car you might as well move to the suburbs. Apparently people looked the other way when GM tore out the train tracks, because it was “progress.” But they had no idea what would happen to the inner cities without good transit systems.
But Adeline Plaza became the best example in my mind. It was a commuter paradise, where my Grandpa could get almost anywhere in the East Bay or SF quickly, for about a dime, with parks and almost silent trains passing through constantly. But when I moved here it was mostly a crossing point for several freeway connectors, and historic empty storefronts, without enough parking for cars or any safe way to cross the street. To say the least, the entire Adeline St. is still simply devastated compared to when travelers could use streetcars to get around. To make it worse, when the BART commuter train was put in, Adeline Plaza was turned into a huge parking lot for people who need cars to even get to the nearest train station, and the station itself is named after a freeway connector, highway 13, “Ashby Ave.” (It’s not an avenue at only, simply a four lane highway punched through the residential neighborhoods that separate the nearest freeways)
The key issues are that
1-The people in this neighborhood have suffered greatly, and are still suffering as a result of GM’s illegal action. The anti-streetcar conspiracy was illegal and has been ruled as such by a U.S. court, but there has never been any compensation. At the least, GM and friends must be required to pay for the cost of rebuilding the streetcar system. From our point of view, GM was a criminal that stole the nicest thing in our neighborhood, in nicest thing in the bay area, and it should be returned. Workers should not have to pay higher taxes to correct the illegal act by GM. Fortunately, GM is a very large corporation and it has enough assets to cover the cost of rebuilding, nationally, the streetcars it illegally destroyed.
These are steetcar reparations, and until something is corrected, the inner cities ravaged by GM will never heal like they should. But this may be the most simple of the three reparation issues. (it is cut and dry who what the crime was, who committed, and how it could repaired-returning the streetcar system including rails to SF. This would help everybody, except the criminal (GM) who must pay for the damage it did.
Reparations for slavery: This is less clear, mostly because it happened so long ago. The crime happened a long time ago, and the courts have apparently never ruled that a crime was committed even though it is completely clear. There were so many victims they can hardly be counted, and none of them are alive. For anyone who tries to brush this over, they must review the facts. The crime was so heinous that there could not possibly be a statute of limitations, and the lasting effect of the crime is still the most severe social issue in our country, that would otherwise be a shining example of freedom and civil rights. Because of this we have widespread poverty, resentment, and crime.
Fact: The U.S. constitution is and was the law of the land. The bill of rights was written to define the ideal society, Liberty and justice for all is not only a nice thought, but it would allow our society to advance at a faster rate of progress. This is why the United State has become the world leader in many issues, because the bill of rights guarantees freedom for each individual to advance as fast as they can. But there are problems. When the constitution was adopted, each state was agreeing to protect the freedoms of all people, and that was the basis for starting the United States, so that everyone could benefit and no longer be at the mercy of royalty or outside powers.
Fact: After the constitution took affect, millions of Americans were systematically denied their rights because several state governments were run by rich dictators who didn’t want the people to have rights. These states should not have been allowed to join the U.S., but they were. If the U.S. had not accepted these states, they would have eventually failed, as all evil powers eventually do. Instead, the Northern states out of convenience chose to overlook the constitution and join hands with the criminal slaveholders, and prop them up. Who benefited? If the North had not supported the South, slavery would have ended a lot sooner. Without the South, Britain would have vanquished the evil in 1812, but enough powerful Americans wanted to hold on to their power, so agreed to keep millions of people enslaved for a long time.
Fact summary: Millions of people unconstitutionally suffered gross injustice and were
never compensates. Both the owners, and the federal govt. and the state governments were responsible. This was such a gross violation of the law/constitution that no statute of limitations or anything would apply.
So what do you do now? None of the slaves are alive anymore, and neither are the people who originally profited. What this page needs is some more links, but for now I’ll do my best to come up with some starting points.
First, hypothetically, what if the actual victims had been compensated when the evil confederacy was brought down? If they had had a good lawyer, they would have sued the rich landowners, the state governments, and the federal govt. for participating in the suffering they had endured. Under standard common law, each victim would surely have been able to own their own house or farm, or they would have been able to get a good education. The criminal slaveholders were rich, and even if each owner’s land had just been divided between the victims it would have been something. I understand that it was suggested that each victim should have received 40 acres and a mule, but it never happened. (Weren’t their any lawyers back then? I guess the South was just too far from San Francisco)
Suppose that they had received fair compensation, instead of having to turn to migrant labor and sharecropping: On average, after years of forced labor with no pay, each one of these victims would expect a decent settlement, certainly making most of them more wealthy than the average American. In modern times, I’m sure the per person damages for
Can you imagine what the average jury would award for 20-50 years of false imprisonment and forced labor, and various additional horrors. If that happened to me, or if I was on a jury, I would certainly expect a 7 figure award as a base minimum. How much would you award for a lifetime of horror? $2 million? $4million? I’ve heard of $14,000,000 awards for relatively minor injuries, and what we’re talking about here seems a lot, lot worse.
So to be fair, we must assume that if the victims rights had been recognized fairly that all of the victims would have been fairly well off after emancipation. To be fair, they never would have had to work again, and neither would their children. But they got nothing, and most of their descendants have been struggling to make it out of povery ever since. Even since emancipation, many of the descendents of the victims have had their constitutional rights denied in other ways, which mostly have also gone uncompensated.
This document is incomplete and cannot be finished at this time, so only a few summary points will be included today.
No matter which calculation you use to determine the damages
that should have been paid to the victims of false imprisonment, it would have been enough.
Being compensated would have allowed them get a good start in America, and our nation would not have the problem of gross financial disparity between families of non-victims and the (often impoverished) descendants of victims of false imprisonment.
The solution is harder. If the 40 acres of rural land would have been just compensation,
that land might have a value of only $100 billion. If this amount of land was divided between the heirs, it would be a big improvement, and the U.S. could afford it easiily, but their should be something better.
Probably a compensation package should include both land and guaranteed education for all descendsts of victims, or something like that. It would certainly be a lot cheaper than imprisoning so amny of the descendants because they are poor.
(The actual damages, maybe $1 million in current dollars per original victim, would still be affordable to the U.S. govt, but it would be a larger budget item. If the reparations were made, it would also solve most of the U.S. poverty based social problems
The other type of reparations included here are freeway reparation, and they are mostly owed to African American communities, in a way related to what happened after reparations were initially denied to to victims of false imprisonment.
When the victims were released after emancipation, they basically had nothing. Many people tried to make a new start by joining the industrial revolution. They started new urban centers in cities across America, where it was cheap to buy a house. By the end of WWII, many American cities had entire of neighborhoods of mostly up and coming working class people, particularly African Americans livign “on the wrong side of the tracks. These people were trying to put the past behind them and join the American dream.
And then our communities were literally run over by the auto industry. As our urban railways were destroyed by GM, developers used their political muscle to ram freeways through the centers of poor (African American) neighborhoods across the country. To make a long story short, the American dream was devastated for everyone who had tried to make a new start. While property values went up in the suburbs, the city centers were devastated by the effects of the freeways, the noise, the exhaust, the increased triffic, and the visual effects of the freeways
OK, how can we address this issue?
Some people don’t understand the need.
I didn’t even pick up on the logic for a long time,
and I consider myself an expert on constitutional and business law.
There are three types of reparations that we will cover here,
Starting small:
Plaza reparations for the illegal streetcar destruction by the auto industry
(this would apply to many, if not most neighborhoods nationwide, but Adeline Plaza is cut and dry.
The nation also has to address freeway reparations,
for the planning and building of terribly harmful freeways
through virtually every inner-city African American neighborhood in the country.
Last but not least, of course, is the issue of reparations
for the most serious crime, victimizing the most people,
of any illegal act in the history of the U.S.
This issue has been swept under the carpets of rich people,
but our nation is still suffering the consequences,
and it must be addressed, the sooner the better.
(These are victims of false imprisonment and forced labor prior to the emancipation proclaimation and collapse of the criminal “confederacy of states”
What are reparations?
This part might be easy if I had a dictionary,
but C’est La Vie, so I’ll give it a shot:
In this context, “Reparations” are
compensation to victims of past crime.
Normally, if someone suffers from an illegal act,
the criminal is legally obligated to compensate the victim(s).
This is common law, and goes back at least to Roman times.
The purpose is to discourage crime.
If someone with money or property illegally hurts you,
causes pain or costs you money or time,
the lawbreaker is legally obligated to compensate you.,
As a last resort, the state/court/legal system may
seize the criminal’s property and sell it
in order to compensate or partially compensate the victim.
Criminals are not allowed to victimize innocent people and
leave them suffering while the criminal retreats to their luxury home.
Even the federal government itself is not allowed
to illegally victimize people and shrug it off.
So what if the crime was so great that the criminal
could not be brought to justice, because of political connections
or because the government itself committed the crime?
And if a broad class of victims was never compensated?
And if the criminal was so wealthy that even years later
they could still afford to compensate the victims?
These are the reparations we are referring to.
The crimes were so great,
and affected such a broad class of people,
That the continued lack of compensation is
Still causing serious problems for broad segments
of our nation, which might otherwise rank as one
the most advanced societies in human history.
However, there are still these lingering problems.
I used to imagine/fantasize that what happened a long time ago,
before I was born, was ancient history,
and just didn’t matter anymore.
. . .. . . But I was wrong. It does matter,
and anyone who doesn’t see a problem that must be solved is blind,
and we must make them see the truth before we can solve the problem.
Streetcar compensation:
My experience: I first experienced the steetcar reparations dilemma when I moved to Oakland in 1989. I had been a working class country boy, but the combined costs and responsibilities of college and having a car were too much, so I moved to the city so that I might not need a car anymore.
Living on Clairemont and Telegraph, and then on Adeline and MacArthur, the issue was clear. These were very dense neighborhoods, with lots of people needing to get around, but we still needed cars! It was almost unbelievable that here, in the heart of the city, there was no good transit. Then I learned that the neighborhoods were originally developed with quick electric streetcars everywhere, and 50 years ago they didn’t need cars, or wide streets, or parking garages, or even ambulances for the victims of cars.
And I learned that none other than General Motors itself had actually financed the destruction of these urban railways. Not enough people would buy cars when they could still ride electric streetcars.
Problem: Even today, these neighborhoods are devastated. You can’t get to work without a car, and if you are going to pay the cost of a car you might as well move to the suburbs. Apparently people looked the other way when GM tore out the train tracks, because it was “progress.” But they had no idea what would happen to the inner cities without good transit systems.
But Adeline Plaza became the best example in my mind. It was a commuter paradise, where my Grandpa could get almost anywhere in the East Bay or SF quickly, for about a dime, with parks and almost silent trains passing through constantly. But when I moved here it was mostly a crossing point for several freeway connectors, and historic empty storefronts, without enough parking for cars or any safe way to cross the street. To say the least, the entire Adeline St. is still simply devastated compared to when travelers could use streetcars to get around. To make it worse, when the BART commuter train was put in, Adeline Plaza was turned into a huge parking lot for people who need cars to even get to the nearest train station, and the station itself is named after a freeway connector, highway 13, “Ashby Ave.” (It’s not an avenue at only, simply a four lane highway punched through the residential neighborhoods that separate the nearest freeways)
The key issues are that
1-The people in this neighborhood have suffered greatly, and are still suffering as a result of GM’s illegal action. The anti-streetcar conspiracy was illegal and has been ruled as such by a U.S. court, but there has never been any compensation. At the least, GM and friends must be required to pay for the cost of rebuilding the streetcar system. From our point of view, GM was a criminal that stole the nicest thing in our neighborhood, in nicest thing in the bay area, and it should be returned. Workers should not have to pay higher taxes to correct the illegal act by GM. Fortunately, GM is a very large corporation and it has enough assets to cover the cost of rebuilding, nationally, the streetcars it illegally destroyed.
These are steetcar reparations, and until something is corrected, the inner cities ravaged by GM will never heal like they should. But this may be the most simple of the three reparation issues. (it is cut and dry who what the crime was, who committed, and how it could repaired-returning the streetcar system including rails to SF. This would help everybody, except the criminal (GM) who must pay for the damage it did.
Reparations for slavery: This is less clear, mostly because it happened so long ago. The crime happened a long time ago, and the courts have apparently never ruled that a crime was committed even though it is completely clear. There were so many victims they can hardly be counted, and none of them are alive. For anyone who tries to brush this over, they must review the facts. The crime was so heinous that there could not possibly be a statute of limitations, and the lasting effect of the crime is still the most severe social issue in our country, that would otherwise be a shining example of freedom and civil rights. Because of this we have widespread poverty, resentment, and crime.
Fact: The U.S. constitution is and was the law of the land. The bill of rights was written to define the ideal society, Liberty and justice for all is not only a nice thought, but it would allow our society to advance at a faster rate of progress. This is why the United State has become the world leader in many issues, because the bill of rights guarantees freedom for each individual to advance as fast as they can. But there are problems. When the constitution was adopted, each state was agreeing to protect the freedoms of all people, and that was the basis for starting the United States, so that everyone could benefit and no longer be at the mercy of royalty or outside powers.
Fact: After the constitution took affect, millions of Americans were systematically denied their rights because several state governments were run by rich dictators who didn’t want the people to have rights. These states should not have been allowed to join the U.S., but they were. If the U.S. had not accepted these states, they would have eventually failed, as all evil powers eventually do. Instead, the Northern states out of convenience chose to overlook the constitution and join hands with the criminal slaveholders, and prop them up. Who benefited? If the North had not supported the South, slavery would have ended a lot sooner. Without the South, Britain would have vanquished the evil in 1812, but enough powerful Americans wanted to hold on to their power, so agreed to keep millions of people enslaved for a long time.
Fact summary: Millions of people unconstitutionally suffered gross injustice and were
never compensates. Both the owners, and the federal govt. and the state governments were responsible. This was such a gross violation of the law/constitution that no statute of limitations or anything would apply.
So what do you do now? None of the slaves are alive anymore, and neither are the people who originally profited. What this page needs is some more links, but for now I’ll do my best to come up with some starting points.
First, hypothetically, what if the actual victims had been compensated when the evil confederacy was brought down? If they had had a good lawyer, they would have sued the rich landowners, the state governments, and the federal govt. for participating in the suffering they had endured. Under standard common law, each victim would surely have been able to own their own house or farm, or they would have been able to get a good education. The criminal slaveholders were rich, and even if each owner’s land had just been divided between the victims it would have been something. I understand that it was suggested that each victim should have received 40 acres and a mule, but it never happened. (Weren’t their any lawyers back then? I guess the South was just too far from San Francisco)
Suppose that they had received fair compensation, instead of having to turn to migrant labor and sharecropping: On average, after years of forced labor with no pay, each one of these victims would expect a decent settlement, certainly making most of them more wealthy than the average American. In modern times, I’m sure the per person damages for
Can you imagine what the average jury would award for 20-50 years of false imprisonment and forced labor, and various additional horrors. If that happened to me, or if I was on a jury, I would certainly expect a 7 figure award as a base minimum. How much would you award for a lifetime of horror? $2 million? $4million? I’ve heard of $14,000,000 awards for relatively minor injuries, and what we’re talking about here seems a lot, lot worse.
So to be fair, we must assume that if the victims rights had been recognized fairly that all of the victims would have been fairly well off after emancipation. To be fair, they never would have had to work again, and neither would their children. But they got nothing, and most of their descendants have been struggling to make it out of povery ever since. Even since emancipation, many of the descendents of the victims have had their constitutional rights denied in other ways, which mostly have also gone uncompensated.
This document is incomplete and cannot be finished at this time, so only a few summary points will be included today.
No matter which calculation you use to determine the damages
that should have been paid to the victims of false imprisonment, it would have been enough.
Being compensated would have allowed them get a good start in America, and our nation would not have the problem of gross financial disparity between families of non-victims and the (often impoverished) descendants of victims of false imprisonment.
The solution is harder. If the 40 acres of rural land would have been just compensation,
that land might have a value of only $100 billion. If this amount of land was divided between the heirs, it would be a big improvement, and the U.S. could afford it easiily, but their should be something better.
Probably a compensation package should include both land and guaranteed education for all descendsts of victims, or something like that. It would certainly be a lot cheaper than imprisoning so amny of the descendants because they are poor.
(The actual damages, maybe $1 million in current dollars per original victim, would still be affordable to the U.S. govt, but it would be a larger budget item. If the reparations were made, it would also solve most of the U.S. poverty based social problems
The other type of reparations included here are freeway reparation, and they are mostly owed to African American communities, in a way related to what happened after reparations were initially denied to to victims of false imprisonment.
When the victims were released after emancipation, they basically had nothing. Many people tried to make a new start by joining the industrial revolution. They started new urban centers in cities across America, where it was cheap to buy a house. By the end of WWII, many American cities had entire of neighborhoods of mostly up and coming working class people, particularly African Americans livign “on the wrong side of the tracks. These people were trying to put the past behind them and join the American dream.
And then our communities were literally run over by the auto industry. As our urban railways were destroyed by GM, developers used their political muscle to ram freeways through the centers of poor (African American) neighborhoods across the country. To make a long story short, the American dream was devastated for everyone who had tried to make a new start. While property values went up in the suburbs, the city centers were devastated by the effects of the freeways, the noise, the exhaust, the increased triffic, and the visual effects of the freeways